In an interview with Eurogamer, World of Warcraft lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas recently offered an explanation for Blizzard Entertainment's plans to offer the chance to boost a character to level 90 for $60. The game's next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, will offer a free boost for one character to level 90. Hazzikostas said the company wanted to offer gamers the chance to boost more than one, but didn't want to devalue the work required to level in the normal fashion by offering a level boost for a lower price.

"We realised as soon as we came out with Warlords of Draenor boost to 90, we knew that there was going to be demand for more than 1," he said.

"It's tremendously awkward to tell someone that you should buy two copies of the expansion just to get a second 90. That's odd. So we knew at that point we were going to have to offer it as a separate service.

But why go for $60, a price point that came in higher than many were expecting? Because Blizzard didn't want to "devalue the accomplishment of levelling"

"In terms of the pricing, honestly a big part of that is not wanting to devalue the accomplishment of levelling," Hazzikostas said.

"If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that - make it $10 or something. And then hardly anyone would ever level a character again.

"But levelling is something that takes dozens if not over 100 hours in many cases and people have put serious time and effort into that, and we don't want to diminish that."